How can I learn to be a wizardly hacker? Well i don't know but you can read the rest from this interesting document: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html by Eric Steven Raymond.
Hacking systems is not on my list of priorities I consider hacking the art of knowing more then the user, each application by itself is a whole new framework, language and comes with an inherent set of vulnerabilities.
The only remotely related things to hacking and me I can come up here is that I can download access files (.MDB) from web servers done by careless webmasters and get passwords using a program I created some three years ago, its sort of a smart key logger with an auto update feature, one can even use it to open a back door, but as it was based on a pull model, so getting caught is a piece of cake.
Well I have to admit it worked great with my .NET web service and I got around 2000 accounts in a week from my university. I am not interested in such kid stuff anymore but if any one wants a copy of the program let me know and I will gladly send it over. It is a VB based program, ironically i don't know VB, even to code a calculator but alas my two years of programming experience then paid of as I ended making the program in less then two days.
Security is more important then ever but security people are still complaining on the same issues they had about 5 years ago. So is it all been talk, i think not but then the information being managed using computers is increasing too, more then in ones imagination, under a conservative review a good amount of terabytes (thousands, more on this later) was added to the web just last year.